Hive House

This eco-friendly property near Scarborough Marsh is a reimagined modular home versatile that from the outside resembles a butterfly taking flight.

Inspired by nature
A two-bedroom home with a screened-in porch adjoining the primary suite, this unique, eco-friendly space achieves the clients’ request for a design unlike any they’d ever seen before. The home is open-concept, with a striking, angular shape and dramatic windows that bring the outside in. 

Revising the modular blueprint
The clients selected a modular home as an efficient, relatively low-waste alternative to custom building, but they wanted to elaborate significantly on the modular company’s basic blueprint. As a result, Polestar worked closely with the modular home company to accommodate the clients’ requests. The flow of the home centers on a dining room, expanded significantly from the original design, that doubles as a dance hall for swing dancing, the clients’ favorite pastime, with a chandelier that can be raised out of the way via a pulley system. Natural materials like the birdseye maple countertop concrete, native granite, and local pine drive the nature-inspired palette, with surprises like the faux-chimney of fieldstone and granite that acts as built-in bookcase, cedar board ceiling in the powder room, and midnight blue concrete panels as a kitchen backsplash, none of which were part of the original model.

Blending in
To reduce the project’s contribution to landfills, the clients chose a custom modular home that could be built in a factory with a quarter of the waste of conventional building. Polestar worked closely with the client to further reduce the home’s environmental footprint, including adding radiant flooring powered by heat pumps, the first of its kind in the state at the time of construction. To embody the clients’ ethos of a light environmental impact, the home was set on pillars to allow native blueberry grasses to retake the ground underneath, with angular black-metal and red cedar “butterfly” wings that make the home appear to lift off the earth.

 Photos by Adam C Powers Photography